To offer highly reliable service availability, network service providers must design their networks to support redundancy among network elements as well as site diversity. Geographical diversity is critical for instances where equipment housed in a physical location is momentarily lost due to an unplanned event. In the event of a failure, site or geographical diversity allows providers to “fail over” to another site with replicated equipment, and thus avoid major service interruptions. Although critical for service availability, site diversity can be costly to be implemented by a single network provider.
Therefore, a need exists for a method and apparatus for enabling disaster recovery using network peering arrangements with other network providers in packet-switched networks, e.g., Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) networks.